Ten New Albums for Your To-Listen Pile

A new installment of Listening Sessions' recurring series on new music

This is the sixth round-up of new and upcoming music I have put together this year. There will be one more installment at the end of 2025 when I attempt to put together my first ever best-of-the-year essay. Wish me luck!

For this round-up, there’s a pretty diverse group of music featured, and I think everyone will dig at least some of it. Let me know which are your favourites.

Right now, I’m in the middle of anothet solo trip in New York so I will next be in touch in two weeks time (November 12) with an essay on my musical adventures in the city.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Sometimes a lyric can take of you and never let go. For me, that would include the opening to Warren Zevon’s ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me.’ It starts, “well, I lay my head on the railroad track, waiting on the double E / but the train don’t run right here no more / poor poor pitiful me.”

Recently, in my listening for new albums I think you will dig, I heard these lines. They go, “Jesus will come ridin’ in on a UFO / Jesus will come crashin’ with his alien buddies / Jesus will come in the nick of time and take us up.” This was before the hubbub about the Rapture. They are sung over a sparse guitar and the singer-songwriter who sings them, Emily Hines, sounds as if she is aboard the craft herself. It’s the high point of her debut album, These Days (Keeled Scales), out since the start of August.

The recording has an arc, beginning with small-group, low-fi indie rock with whatever gloss there is gradually peeled away for the gauzy, acid-folk of ‘UFO’ and the album closer, ‘Cedar on the River.’ Hines is a direct, intimate singer and in the crush that has greeted Taylor Swift’s new album, I hope that some may also take a break and give a listen to Hines too.

There is a retro feel to These Days, a cosmic aura that brings to mind Judee Sill. Amanda Pascali’s latest, Roses and Basil (Missing Piece Records), released in the middle of September, is old school too but here, the references are Roy Orbison, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and the days when Italian songs were the rage.

On her website, her music is described as “Immigrant American folk” and elaborated upon as, “too foreign for here, too foreign for home and never enough for both.” And indeed, there is a feeling listening to Roses and Basil similar to hearing the classic recordings of Harry Belafonte. One’s horizons are broadened and in that widening, one learns about those who are different from he or she, and is all the better for it. The album is a mix of originals as well as Pascali’s translations of traditional Sicilian songs—in addition to being a singer-songwriter, Pascali is, among other things, studying ethnomusicology and Italian studies at the University of Texas at Austin as a Harrington Fellow.

I especially enjoyed the lullaby title track and the early sixties-like nirvana of ‘Wake Up Baby! (E Vui Durmiti Ancora).’ Pascali is an artist making really interesting music and I’m glad to dig into it. I think you’ll feel the same way after giving it a listen.

Guitar Gwenifer Raymond released her third album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark (We Are Busy Bodies) on the first Friday of September. She’s Welsh, now residing in Bristol, England but her soul seems to have a permanent home in Appalachia if her knotty compositions and playing are any indication.

It’s always startling to hear music that is this pared down. There are no compromises or concessions but picking up a guitar or any other stringed instrument and making it sound like an orchestra is getting to the source of what music ultimately is. Give a listen to the title track and see if you don’t feel the same sense of awe.

Music that is in your face is something I’ve been drawn to more recently, including recent releases by Haim and the Beaches, and the confrontational debut recording by the New Eves. The latest from Automatic, a Los Angeles-based trio who take their name from a song by the Go-Go’s, approaches this attitude from a different angle. Their sound is synth-based which casts the music on Is It Now? (Stones Throw Records), out for about a month now, with a hipster vibe that is hypnotic.

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The group’s vocals, all three member of the group: Izzy Glaudini, Lola Dompé and Halle Saxon, are similarily disaffected. Hear the back and forth on ‘Country Song’ in which “bye bye city” is answered with “let’s pack it up for an adventure” and then “no more concrete” is followed by “who would have thought I’m a country wife.” The lyrics are simple, the sentiment implied is anything but.

Groups as compact as Automatic seem to be the norm these days. Aggregations whose membership sprawled into the double digits used to be not all that uncommon. The Canadian group Dr. Music in its initial lineup had 18 members: 13 musicians and five singers. Leading the group was Doug Riley and they were best known for the soaring ‘Sun Goes By.’ Motivation’s collaborative force numbers 21 musicians and is spearheaded by producer Michael Simard. Their first album, Take It to the Sky (self-released) came out at the end of September and is a tribute to the music of the seventies that fitted into the liminal space between jazz, soul and funk. Think Earth, Wind & Fire, the Crusaders and Deodato, all of whom are given a nod here.

What makes this album particularly exciting is its reach. Motivation boasts both a horn section and a string section and they steer clear from obvious selections to which homage would be given. ‘That’s the Way the World Is,’ ‘Street Life’ and Also sprach Zarathustra are nowhere to be heard. In their place are the title track, ‘Free As the Wind’ and ‘Skyscrapers.’ There is also a prelude to ‘Take Me to the Sky,’ written by alto saxophonist Bill Runge that recalls both the spaciousness of early ECM and the commercialism of CTI. What also enables the album to reach the loftiness of its goal is its mix of instrumental numbers with those with vocals. It constantly switches the mood.

A similar mix is found on Still Cookin’ at 90: The Canada Sessions Vol. II (Chronograph Records). Who’s still cookin’ at 90? That would be trumpeter Al Muirhead, who’s been playing music for 80 years now. Here, the feel is back to the heyday of the Great American Songbook—I’d like to feel it’s still in its heyday—with Muirhead joined by a rotating cast of players for eight intimate performances.

Music like this could be called cozy, a lyrical security blanket and indeed, hearing Muirhead caress the melody of ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ a song that never gets old, with pianist Robi Botos and bassist Mike Downes, is comfort defined. Vocalist Caity Gyorgy joins for a fun version of ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ and a romantic take on ‘More Than You Know,’ and Jocelyn Gould sings on ‘I Thought About You’ and plays guitar on a jaunty ‘My Shining Hour.’ Still Cookin’ at 90 may be the album this year that I liked the most that I didn’t expect to be anything but sonic wallpaper.

Just looking at the cover of Introducing: the Russ Macklem Detroit Quintet (TQM Recording) was enough to know that I’d probably like it. Macklem is photographed in profile, trumpet in his left hand, a cigarillo in his mouth, smoke rising in the air. Another good sign is that the album focuses on Detroit. The Motor City is a jazz town.

Macklem is joined by Kasan Belgrave (Marcus’ son) on alto saxophone, Jordon Anderson on piano, Noah Jackson on bass and Louis Jones III on drums. They play up-front, declarative jazz, brimming with energy. Nothing fancy here and that’s not meant as a put-down. The themes have an emotive call, the solos are urgent and searching. In other words, the good stuff.

And here’s some more of that good stuff. Montreal pianist Kate Wyatt’s new album, Murmurations (self-released), with bassist Adrian Vedady and drummer Louis-Vincent Hamel, came out just before Canadian Thanskgiving and is an introverted piece of trio interplay. Leading off with Vedady’s arrangement of ‘Mack the Knife,’ sounding nothing like it’s usually sung or played—brooding here as opposed to spritely—tips the listener off to the wonderous sounds to follow.

There are compositions inspired by birds in flight (the title track), Montana (‘Going to the Sun’), Buddhism (‘Bardo’) and Bill Frissell (‘Music is Beautiful’). Wyatt’s solos are dense, full of chords and left-right dialogue. Vedady and Hamel are attentive accompaniments. All three write too. Murmurations is an album fit for autumn—rich and lustrous.

An album that slipped under the radar is the newest from trumpeter (although now it may be more accurate to call him a multi-instrumentalist) Nicholas Payton. TRIUNE (Smoke Sessions Records) features Payton on trumpet but he is heard primarily playing the keys: piano, the Fender Rhodes and the clavinet. With him is esperanza spalding on bass and vocals, and Karriem Riggins on drums. Guesting are Nicki Glaspie, Erica Falls and Otis McDonald on vocals as well as Ivan Neville on organ, clavinet and vocals too.

There’s a wide terrain on the album: a lot of groove, traces of neo-soul, fusion and funk, and a loose, improvisatory feel. Most of it floats like a dream, especially ‘Ultraviolet’ with a wordless vocal by spalding and a dreamy solo by Payton on piano once the trio moves into a standard jazz swing. Payton may not pierce too deep as a piano player but I feel TRIUNE is a refreshing, relaxing recording in the best way.

The lens is way wider for vibraphonist Patricia Brennan’s Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic Records), released last Friday (October 24). Getting the press announcement of it at the beginning of the month was exciting. Brennan is one of the elite players on her instrument—Warren Wolf may be her only equal. Her new album is fueled by her interest in astrology and the compositions she wrote for it have a spaciousness that inspire awe such as ‘Aquarius.’

Their ethereal quality is brilliantly realized by a quintet of Brennan with Sylvie Courvoisier on piano, Miles Okazaki on guitar, Kim Cass on bass and John Hollenbeck on drums with a string quartet—Modney and Pala Garcia on violin, Kyle Armburst on viola and Michael Nicolas on bass—plus Arktureye on electronic with conductor Eli Greenhoe keeping everything together. Of the Near and Far is the kind of album that one can play five, ten times and still barely scratch the surface.